Teachers 'sabotage' tying pay to results

By John Clare

12:00AM GMT 15 Nov 2002

Teachers have effectively sabotaged a £1 billion Government scheme to link their pay to results, a report published yesterday by Ofsted showed.

The pay scheme, which came into force two years ago, offered a £2,000 pay rise to 250,000 teachers who had been in the profession for at least seven years, but only after they had crossed a "performance threshold". This included setting "realistic" exam targets for their pupils and showing that they had been achieved.

In the event, virtually every teacher who applied to cross the threshold was awarded the £2,000 pay rise.

However, Ofsted found that half of all teachers had either "no discernible pupil progress objective" or an objective so unsatisfactorily worded that it was "not fit for purpose".

That suggested more than 100,000 teachers had pocketed the money without giving anything in return.

In a "large minority" of the schools inspected, the performance management of teachers "did not comply fully with the requirements of the Government's strategy", Ofsted said. The report went on: "Few schools have a clear rationale for linking teachers' pay with their performance. In about a sixth of all the schools, the teachers' attitudes towards staff appraisal were very negative."

Ofsted said the same was true of head teachers' appraisal. "In as many as 40 per cent of the schools, either there was no attempt to quantify the improvement in pupils' performance that was required, or the head teacher had no pupil performance objective whatsoever," the report said.

"It was evident that, in some of these cases, the head teachers were reluctant to commit themselves to anything quantifiable for fear of failing to meet the objective, with its predicted impact on pay."

Estelle Morris, who was in charge of the scheme before resigning as Education Secretary last month, boasted that performance-related pay would lead to more effective teaching and "modernise the profession".

However, the two biggest teaching unions - the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Schoolmasters/Union of Women Teachers - rejected the scheme from the start.

• The third largest classroom teachers' union, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, has voted against a one-day walkout in London on Nov 26. The two biggest unions will go ahead with the strike in pursuit of higher living allowances, closing many schools.